Railroads, the National Parks, and Material Culture
______________________________________________________
Announcements:
(1) Begin reviewing material now.
(2) Review sessions will be announced on Wednesday.
I. Railroads and the Humane Movement: recap
John H. White notes that: “few subjects seem to bore the public more than freight service. The type of equipment used, the volume of traffic, its importance to the economy and the smooth flow of everyday life—all this is of no consequence or interest. It becomes a topic only if the service is interrupted by a strike or a natural catastrophe. . . . There is at least one exception to this general indifference, and that is the controversy over the human shipment of animals by rail, a debate that peaked during the 1880s.”
White, John H. 1993. The American Railroad Freight Car: From the Wood-Car Era to the Coming of Steel. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Up to ten thousand palace stock cars in service by the time Sinclair published his attack on them in 1892. Most owned and operated by private car liness, e.g., Burton, Hicks, Mather, and Canda.
II. Railroads and the National Parks
Runte, Alfred. 1997. National Parks: The American Experience. 3rd ed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
Runte, Alfred. 1990. Trains of Discovery: Western Railroads and the National Parks. Revised ed. Niwot, Colorado: Robert Rinehart.
Thomas Moran and the Hayden expedition to Yellowstone:
"Meanwhile, Hayden had been busy lobbying Congress, with the enthusiastic backing of the Northern Pacific Railroad's directors, to set aside Yellowstone as a national park—a museum of American sublimity. To prove its uniqueness, he displayed Moran's sketches and Jackson's photographs; and in March 1871 President Grant signed into law an act of Congress protecting the whole Yellowstone area, thirty-five hundred square miles of it, in perpetuity. This was to do wonders for the Northern Pacific Railroad's cash flow—and, not incidentally, for Moran's. The Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone became the first American landscape by an American artist ever bought by the American government. It cost $10,000, or about 8o cents per square inch, and it went straight on view in the Capitol, where the effigies of so many flesh-and-blood heroes were to be seen. This, too, was a painting of a hero: the landscape as hero, limbs of rock, belly of water, hair of trees, all done with absorbing virtuosity. It rivaled Church and outdid Bierstadt in offering the panoramic thrill that no watercolor can give, and the density of substance that no photograph could rival. It became a prime symbol of wilderness tourism. Two years later, Moran tried to repeat its success with an even larger canvas, The Chasm of the Colorado, the result of an expedition down the Grand Canyon led by Colonel John Wesley Powell, another surveyor who needed, as he put it, an artist of Moran's stature to paint scenes that were ‘too vast, too complex, and too grand for verbal description.’ Moran certainly did his best, but the Canyon defeated him—as it has defeated all landscape painters since; not even he could solve the principal problem of painting it, the lack of any scale that related to the human body and so might allow the viewer to imagine himself on the edge of the scene.” - From Robert Hughes, American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America
Thomas Moran
Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, 1872
Golden Gateway of the Yellowstone, 1893
Examples of advertising of the Northern Pacific Railroad[SLIDES]
Printing of these paintings into lithographs, etc.
III. Material Culture Studies
See for example:
Schlereth, Thomas J. 1980. Artifacts and the American Past. Nashville: American Association for State and Local History.
Trachtenberg, Alan. 1989. Reading American Photographs: Images as History, Mathew Brady to Walker Evans. New York: Hill and Wang.
Library of Congress American Memory Collections
Railroad maps at the Library of Congress
Photos: images available in books, archival collections, and on the web
Movies: including movies, film
(Cornell connection needed)
from Cornell’s description:
“Sanborn fire insurance maps were produced by the Sanborn Map Company to provide accurate, current and detailed information to the fire insurance industry for risk assessment purposes. Between 1880 and 1950, the Company had mapped over 12,000 U.S. towns. The maps were revised periodically in order to be accurate and suitable for the intended use. This series of revisions provides the historical researcher with an invaluable series of neighborhood snapshots.
“The maps typically show a bird's eye view of a community at the scale of one inch to fifty feet. At this scale, it is possible to show each building in outline. The original maps were color encoded to indicate each building's exterior construction material. A complex set of symbols -- initials, numerals, an assortment of lines, circles and squares -- are used to describe a building's use, composition and appearance.”
From the Library of Congress:
“The fire insurance map is probably the single most important record of urban growth and development in the United States during the past one hundred years. It contains data used in estimating the potential risk for urban structures and includes such information as their construction material, height, and function as well as the location of lot lines. The Sanborn Map Company has been the dominant American publisher of fire insurance maps and atlases for over seventy years. Founded by D. A. Sanborn in 1867, the firm has issued and periodically updated detailed plans of 12,000 American cities and towns. In 1967, shortly after the Sanborn Company discontinued its large-scale map series, the Census Bureau transferred to the Library of Congress 1,840 volumes of Sanborn maps. Together with material acquired through copyright deposit, the Sanborn Fire Insurance Map Collection numbers approximately seven hundred thousand sheets in bound and unbound volumes. While the earliest atlas dates from 1867, most fall within the period 1876 to 1961. Some areas are represented by as many as seven or eight different editions.”
Chicago grain elevators, 1901, .pdf
Chicago packing houses, 1901, .pdf
Sanborn map key, .pdf (large file, 2.3 MB)
